| Living standards have fallen. The country is exhausted by constant drama. But the U.K. can’t move on from the Tories without facing up to the damage that has occurred.  Photo illustration by Javier Jaén; Source photographs from Getty “These have been years of loss and waste,” Sam Knight writes in a rigorously reported and incredibly damning examination of the recent epoch of British life, which began in 2010, when the Conservative Party, then led by David Cameron, gained power. The subsequent fourteen years of Tory leadership, with a succession of Prime Ministers, have been marked by a series of disasters: austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, a handful of other more vague but no less troubling markers of failure. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” a former governor of the Bank of England explains. “It’s just not that productive an economy anymore.” It might be tempting, Knight argues, to look at the crisis of Britain in the broadest and most maudlin of strokes. “If you live in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline,” he writes. “The state withers. The charlatans take over. You give up on progress, to some extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of British nonsense will come to an end.” But a country cannot move forward without honestly reckoning with where it has gone wrong. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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